Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Adobe Lightroom squares up against Aperture and RawShooter

There is increasing coverage of Adobe Lightroom, a new RAW workflow tool. This follows a lot of noise about Apple's Aperture application. I've not lost much sleep over Aperture, mainly because I don't have a Mac - and although they are very desirable machines, I'm not expecting to go there any time soon[*]. Also, some of the coverage of Aperture has been more than a little mixed in the levels of praise, for an application that puts such a dent in the wallet.

Lightroom sounds interesting, since it will run on Windows as well, and Adobe clearly already have a lot of experience in digital imaging. I like the look of the application. The layout reminds me a lot of my RAW tool of choice, RawShooter Premium. The features are tempting - Lightroom can work not only with RAW files, but with JPEG, TIFF and PSD... JPEG at least is something I would use, and probably TIFF too. The Greyscale Mixer and the number of processing options are exciting - with RawShooter I sometimes have to switch to The Gimp for some post-processing. Of course, pricing hasn't been announced yet - if it competes favourably with RawShooter, I might even be tempted.

[*] I'm sidestepping the fact that none of these apps run on Linux, which they clearly could do if the writers made an effort... it's just disappointing.

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